held together with string
by Min Daae
Summary: Time and again boys are raised to be men: impatient they start, fearful at end. Post-Thor.


He dreamed he was holding Loki's hand as he hung over the abyss, and their eyes met and locked. Loki's eyes, more familiar than his own, were full of rage and madness and sheer bitter terror. "Hold on," Thor said, "Let me pull you up."

But then he was letting go, his grip loosening instead of tightening, hand moving as if it wasn't his own to pry Loki's grip open, and Loki opened his mouth to cry out but he was already gone into the dark.

Thor jerked upright in his bed, panting. His room was gloomy and cold and quiet, and Loki was still gone.

~.~

It wasn't a new dream. Was only a slightly different flavor of the same that he'd had nearly every night. Seven nights since Loki had fallen, and every day Thor still hoped…

His mother still walked the halls cast in shadow and seemed to be not speaking to the All-Father. Odin was quiet and inscrutable, betraying nothing of his no one else spoke Loki's name. Avoided it, as if by saying it they would taint themselves with his wicked deeds.

And Thor could feel his shadow in every hall.

_How long, _Thor wondered. How long had Loki been slipping away and he had not seen, how long had he been stretching and bending and finally breaking? Three days he had been gone, and then home and he had hardly known his brother. No one would say, no one could tell him what had happened.

"He wanted what you had," Sif said. "And with you gone…"

But that was wrong. Thor knew that to be wrong. Could feel it in his gut, that it wasn't that simple, that he'd missed something vital and it had cost his brother's life.

And that was what he could not quite understand. That Loki was gone, that where his brother had been there was nothing now. Death was an abstract, something that happened to mortals or the very old or sometimes to warriors in heated battle. Not to Loki, who _was _life, who was vibrant and wild energy, always in motion, always speaking doing thinking and now-

The loosening of his fingers. The slow wash of emptiness into his eyes. Gone.

How could, Thor wanted to know, someone be so very there one moment, and gone the next? Like one of his magic tricks. There, and then gone. Blink and where had Loki disappeared to, and Thor had never been able to find him, not when Loki didn't want to be found.

When he'd been young Loki had done that when Thor was meant to be watching him, and distraught at losing his younger brother, Thor remembered weeping. Loki had reappeared at once. "It's just a trick," he said, soothingly. "Now you see me…"

Just a trick.

~.~

Loki's room was quiet and still and empty.

He'd hesitated before going in, remembering a thousand times Loki had yelled at him for barging in and interrupting some delicate work – or simply Loki's quiet reading time. Hesitated as though behind the door Loki might still be reading,

But of course he was not. There was only silence, and already a thin layer of dust settling on the books piled high on his desk. Thor picked one up and dusted it off, opened it as though to look at the runes he could not read would reveal some mystery, some secret, some answer to the problem of Loki that he could not find.

There was nothing there.

His bed was as impeccably made as ever, perfectly neat, as though it had never been slept in. The candle by his bed was burned down to a stub. Thor crossed the room to the windows and threw the curtains open, the dark, stuffy air suddenly too much, but all it did was throw light into the empty corners of the room and it no longer even felt like Loki's. Was just another empty space where something else had been but was no longer.

He stood in the middle as if by lingering there he could absorb some last fragments. Hear the murmur of Loki's voice coaxing illusion into life. See his eyes shine with bright and vivid pride as something came together. The wicked gleam to his gaze and the sound of his laugh when a new trick made a fool of some braggart.

_Know your place, brother. _Had he really said that? This was Loki's place. Had been. Not in that gaping, endless abyss whose welcome Loki had taken without a word, the tether Thor had mistaken for strong that held Loki to him in the end nothing but a strand of hair.

~.~

He stood at the broken end of the Bifrost, the winds of the void whistling around him like a summer storm, and looked out into space.

"Heimdall," he had asked, as he did every day without hope, "Have you seen my brother Loki?"

"No, Prince Thor," Heimdall said, calm and grave, gaze still far distant. "He is hidden from my sight."

Perhaps, Thor thought sometimes, it was just that. Hidden. Loki had been able to keep himself from Heimdall's sight when he wished for years. Perhaps he was hiding himself now, in some dark crevasse, lost and alone and injured adrift in the universe without anyone-

And would that be better?

_How would I find you, _Thor thought, as if he could be answered. _Tell me where to look. _But if Loki was hiding it was where Thor could not follow. And he had let it happen. He had been Loki's protector and guardian for so much of their lives. But in the end-

It had been something else altogether that Loki needed, and that he had entirely failed to give.

~.~

Frigga wore the clothes of mourning even after the required period was over, her clothes dark and steps heavy and expression full of solemn pain. Loki had always been close to her in a way Thor never had been, taking comfort from her long past the age when Thor was squirming away for fear of looking weak. Loki had learned many of his ways from her, even some of his fighting style, slight and slender as he was, and Thor remembered calling him womanish, cowardly.

He went to his mother's quarters and knocked on her door. She opened it a moment later, and regarded him with a quiet, sad gaze. The unrelieved black seemed to weigh her down, stooping her shoulders.

"Come in, my son," she said, after a moment. "Sit down."

Thor stepped inside and awkwardly over to one of the low chairs. He pictured, for a moment, Loki in it, curled up with his legs tucked underneath him and some hot drink cupped between his hands. He'd seen that image before. Half-expected to see it now.

"Mother…" he said, slowly. "I don't…I still don't understand."

"And you think that I can explain it to you?" There was something sharp in Frigga's voice, however faint. "You think that I can tell you the reasons why even as one son was returned to me the other was lost? Do you think that I can tell you the wisdom that underlaid his suffering, or explain the ways in which we failed?"

_Failed. _It was a word in this matter that had not been spoken except within Thor's own mind. Hearing it from his mother almost made him flinch. _We failed. _"I don't know," he said, feeling suddenly lost, and Frigga looked away and a moment later sank down into the other chair.

"I am sorry," she murmured. "I should not vent my grief on you. I can see so clearly now all the things I should have done and should have said. They weigh heavy on my mind. And yet I am told-" She shook her head. "Death is…death is not something that can be understood, my son. Particularly when it is sudden."

"But it seems there ought to be something I should have done," Thor said, and Frigga looked at him with so much sympathy and so much sorrow.

"You were not here," she said. "What could you have done?"

"Tell me what happened," Thor asked, and Frigga looked away.

"Maybe someday," she said. Almost whispered. "But not now. I would have you grieve your brother as he was. Not what those dark days made of him."

_But that's all I can think about, _Thor thought. _How I hardly even knew him. _"Is there any chance," he asked, after a moment of silence, "That he is not…that he is not gone? Not dead?"

"Odin has given up," Frigga said, again with that sharp note Thor did not think he had ever heard from her before, and he stared at her. "He has said that there is nothing more-" She cut off again, and Thor thought of Odin's voice as Loki hung from the brink, eyes full of wounds. _No, Loki. _

_Was there nothing else you could have said, _he thought, and then was immediately ashamed to doubt. The wisdom of the All-Father was complete and unfailing and just. He could not have known.

"I don't understand how he can be gone," Thor said, and his voice sounded lost and small to his own ears. "I want…I want him back. And I can't have that. I'll never see him again. And I don't understand why…"

"Oh, my boy," Frigga said, "My son," and drew him into an embrace, her tears damp on his shoulder.

~.~

"Why did he do it," Thor demanded, on one of the days when anger rose up in him like a canker, choking him with its bitterness. His friends glanced among each other.

"He wanted the throne," Volstagg said, finally, though he sounded unsure, and Thor growled at him.

"I don't mean that. I mean – why did he let go, why did he have to – why wouldn't he just _speak _to me?"

(_He was always speaking to you, _the thought murmured in the back of his mind. _You never heard. Why should he think that would have changed?_)

His friends exchanged furtive glances. "I couldn't tell you, Thor," Fandral said, finally, with a shrug. "You always knew him better than we did. As much as anyone knew him."

_But not well enough, _Thor thought with frustration. _I didn't know him well enough. _"Did he speak to none of you?" Thor demanded. "Did none of you speak to him, and ask…"

Their eyes slid from his, and Thor already knew the answer to that. Loki so seldom spoke to anyone, even Thor. Loki held his wounds close, and shared seldom, and even in spite of that – they were his friends. Not Loki's. They would have been thinking of him.

"I should have been here," Thor said, his anger melting away. "If I had been sooner, by but a day…"

"Thor," said Sif, awkwardly. "You can't blame yourself. The wickedness in Loki's heart-"

"Is dead," Thor said, harshly, and his voice cracked. "As my brother is dead. Would you have me rejoice in it, as some do? Forget the battles we fought together, the wounds he took for me and I for him? I watched my brother give up his own life. Is it so unfathomable that I might wonder what I might have done?"

"Thor," said Hogun, the first words he had spoken, but Thor glared at him, and he fell silent. Thor knew he was being unreasonable, treating his friends undeservedly harshly when they had done nothing, when they were likely in the right and he was acting foolishly, letting his emotion master him when he needed to think of Asgard and the destroyed Bifrost and not wallow in grief.

He just wasn't certain that he cared enough to stop.

_If Loki were here,_ he couldn't help thinking, _he would know what to say to make me laugh. _If he were here, his mother would smile again and his father would not seem so distant and shadowed. All would be right with the world once more, like a nightmare passing.

But Loki was not, and Thor didn't know how to fix everything that had gone wrong alone.

~.~

He dreamed he stood with Loki at his side, shoulder to shoulder as they once had. "I cannot stay," Loki said quietly. "Here our paths must part."

"No," said Thor, passionately. "I say they must not," and Loki laughed, a soft and bitter sound.

"What you say is not always so," he said. "And some things cannot be changed."

The dream shifted and it was Loki hanging over the abyss again, eyes locked in his. "Hold on," Thor said desperately. "Loki, hold on!"

"To what," Loki said, and there was no hammer, no rope, Loki's empty hand reaching for his, but his fingers closed only on empty air.

Another day, he thought, dully, opening his eyes to the ceiling. Another day to try to remember life without grief and be unsure that he wanted to leave it behind, because leaving grief behind would mean letting go of Loki, and he did not know that…

…did not want to do that again, when he already had.

The morning light spilled through his window and onto Thor's empty hands clenching in the blanket. Bright and pure and golden, and Thor missed the shadow at his side.


End file.
